‘She couldn’t or wouldn’t explain what these visitors were, why they woke her and the other two mothers, or why they left,’ Ysbel said. ‘And as yet there’s no evidence for their existence. But we still don’t know why the mothers woke when they did, and there’s also the radio telescope that Mother built, on the Moon’s far side. Mother told us that she was using it to look for others like her. Other seedships. Human settlements on planets on other stars. But if there were no seedships or settlements, what was it really for?’

‘You think she might have been searching for those visitors from another star?’

‘Even if she wasn’t, maybe we could use it to look for them. If we find any trace of them, if that part of the Other Mother’s story is true, fantastic though it seems, then the rest must be true too.’

There was a short silence while the two women contemplated the stars scattered everywhere in the cloudless night sky.

Trina said, ‘What do the natives think of it?’

‘They’ve already met one set of visitors. Namely us. What’s one more?’

‘The usual pragmatism.’

‘It’s served them well. They’ve never had a war, hardly ever resort to violence amongst themselves. Instead, they talk endlessly, try to find the best common path or the best compromise … Basically, they are better at being people than we are.’

‘But not necessarily better at being interesting,’ Trina said.

‘You wouldn’t say that if you’d spent as much time amongst them as I have.’

‘Not much chance of that now, is there? After we find Raia we’ll be heading back to the Gathering Place, and that will be the end of that.’

‘For now,’ Ysbel said, remembering Goodwill’s parting words.

They took turns to feed the fire and keep watch through the night, and in the morning they kicked dirt over its embers and packed up their camp and walked on, turning north and east to follow a rising ridge, picking their way through boulder fields, crossing miniature meadows of grass and moss, fragile and lovely pockets of life in the stony immensity of the mountains. They passed a hollow packed with last winter’s snow, protected from sunlight by the shadow of a granite crag, saw a conspiracy of ravens turning in an airy gulf far below and wild goats perched at improbable intervals on a vertical cliff. Trina found a short stack of rocks, balanced one on top of the other, and said that Raia might have left it as a waymark, but Ysbel thought that it could have been made a moonspan or a century or two hundred centuries ago.